Is there any possibility that the Obama administration and the IRS are not criminally obstructing the House Ways and Means Committee investigation into the targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups? On Friday the IRS announced that it had lost email communications between Lois Lerner and outside agencies for the period between January of 2009 and April of 2011. A computer crash, the IRS said.
It so happens that the emails requested by Ways and Means included Lerner's communications with the White House, the Treasury Department, the Department of Justice, the Federal Elections Commission and the offices of congressional Democrats. Just those communications, for just that particular time period when the IRS was admittedly targeting Tea Party and conservative groups, are the ones that the IRS now claims were lost because of the crash. How is that possible?
In light of this announcement Sharyl Attkisson has formulated some questions for the IRS.
- Please provide a timeline of the crash and documentation covering when it was first discovered and by whom; when, how and by whom it was learned that materials were lost; the official documentation reporting the crash and federal data loss; documentation reflecting all attempts to recover the materials; and the remediation records documenting the fix. This material should include the names of all officials and technicians involved, as well as all internal communications about the matter.
- Please provide all documents and emails that refer to the crash from the time that it happened through the IRS’ disclosure to Congress Friday that it had occurred.
- Please provide the documents that show the computer crash and lost data were appropriately reported to the required entities including any contractor servicing the IRS. If the incident was not reported, please explain why.
- Please provide a list summarizing what other data was irretrievably lost in the computer crash. If the loss involved any personal data, was the loss disclosed to those impacted? If not, why?
- Please provide documentation reflecting any security analyses done to assess the impact of the crash and lost materials. If such analyses were not performed, why not?
- Please provide documentation showing the steps taken to recover the material, and the names of all technicians who attempted the recovery.
- Please explain why redundancies required for federal systems were either not used or were not effective in restoring the lost materials, and provide documentation showing how this shortfall has been remediated.
- Please provide any documents reflecting an investigation into how the crash resulted in the irretrievable loss of federal data and what factors were found to be responsible for the existence of this situation.
- I would also ask for those who discovered and reported the crash to testify under oath, as well as any officials who reported the materials as having been irretrievably lost.
Is it still possible to believe that Obama himself had no hand in the targeting? Hard to imagine.
Update: Mark Tapscott notes in a Washington Examiner column:
On the same day the new HOGR report was made public, Mitchell -- a partner in the Foley & Lardner law firm -- reminded Justice Department attorneys that multiple federal laws require preservation of all emails concerning official government business.
The emails must also be preserved as evidence in litigation, including the civil suit Mitchell filed against the government and a dozen individual IRS employees on behalf of True the Vote, one of the Tea Party group's most egregiously harassed by the IRS.
In other words, besides destroying federal property, anybody who may have had a hand in making that computer crash could also face evidence-tampering charges. Serious jail time follows convictions.
This isn't going away soon.